Legacy marchers

As Sharon Rodi wove through the densely packed crowd on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., she talked on and off about the weather and the clothes she had worn to fend off the 21-degree chill during the March for Life on Jan. 21. Rodi had foot warmers, hand warmers, and lots of layers underneath her long gray coat, including black faux snakeskin pants. But for once, she hadn’t brought her fold-up poncho in case of rain. Good thing the day in D.C. turned out to be sunny.

“This isn’t near as cold as it’s been in other years. I mean, this is bearable,” said Rodi, the National Right to Life delegate from Louisiana and a board member of several pro-life organizations in her home state. “I can stand here now. Other times it’s been absolutely miserable. Like it could be this cold and it could be raining.”

Rodi would know what D.C. in January could be like. Although she doesn’t look it, she’s 79 and has attended most of the annual Marches for Life since they first started in January 1974, on the first anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that effectively legalized abortion throughout the country. That first year, she was 31 and came to the march to represent the pregnancy center she headed up in New Orleans.

It was cold then too: She remembers laughing that year when one of the men in her group admitted he kept his pajama pants on to stay warm. A couple years later, it was so cold that she and some friends ducked in and out of buildings on their way down Constitution Avenue to escape the chill. Most years, she wears a mink coat that she inherited from her mother in the 1980s. And this year, as has become routine, she’s got on the Ugg boots that her daughter gave her a few years back.

Rodi became involved with the pro-life movement after hearing about the Roe decision. Her daughters were 3 and 5, and it shocked her to think that the law could allow people to kill their children. “I remember vividly, ‘I should do something now or else five years from now this will still be the law,’” she said.

Now, almost 50 years later, it still is the law, but pro-lifers are hopeful that a big change is coming in 2022. On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case of a Mississippi pro-life law that protects babies from abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation. Many pro-lifers are hopeful that the Supreme Court will uphold the law, giving other states more freedom to enact abortion bans and restrictions.

From where Rodi stood during the noon rally before the march, it was hard to hear the speakers. But she could hear the frequent and thundering cheers coming from the youthful crowd. During the rally, March for Life President Jeanne Mancini laughed and admitted that since becoming president in 2012, she’s “never seen such an excited crowd.”

Perhaps it had something to do with the anticipation that the Supreme Court might use the Dobbs case to overturn Roe v. Wade. Multiple speakers at the rally alluded to that possibility, one saying what a lot of people were thinking: “We are closer than ever to reversing Roe v. Wade.”

Old-timers like Rodi have been around long enough to know that the reversal they’re anticipating falls far short of what March for Life founder Nellie Gray set out to achieve when she organized the 1974 march. But the event that Gray started as a protest against legal abortion has taken on another role: a way for pro-lifers to pass on the pro-life legacy to the younger generations. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in the Mississippi case, pro-lifers recognize lots of work remains to be done, and the march could continue to play a part.

AT THE FIRST MARCH FOR LIFE in 1974, Connie Marshner was a 22-year-old employee of the organization that would one day become the Heritage Foundation. The march was on a Tuesday, but Marshner went anyway because the organization’s president gave everyone a day off to go.

“In the context of the times, everybody protested everything by having a march on Washington,” said Marshner. But it was a new thing for her and others in her circles: “This wasn’t something that respectable conservatives did.”

Starting a march for conservatives wasn’t founder Nellie Gray’s plan either. “Nellie was a good Democrat, she was a good liberal Democrat. … Totally unknown to the quote-unquote conservatives on Capitol Hill who had been paying attention to the issue,” said Marshner.

Gray, a lawyer and a U.S. government employee in the Departments of State and Labor, saw abortion as a humanitarian issue and went to her heroes in Congress who had taken a stand on other human rights questions. Her plan was to have a one-time march on Washington as a way to encourage Congress to pass a law that would undo the Roe v. Wade decision. But when her Democratic heroes wouldn’t listen, she turned to Republicans and conservatives. Marshner remembers that Gray, who died in 2012, would often talk about how stunned she was when she discovered she’d have to work with people whom she had always seen as political enemies.

When 1974 came and went, leaving Roe unscathed, Gray decided to hold a March for Life every year.

“We will be here until we overturn Roe v. Wade,” Gray said in an interview at one of the annual rallies, standing before the camera in her signature red suit and dark permed hair. But her idea of what that would look like was not what every other pro-lifer had in mind. Marshner said Gray’s agenda was clear through the speakers she chose to invite to speak at the marches year after year.

“That was always a point of drama,” said Marshner, explaining that Gray only invited speakers who advocated a personhood approach. Sen. Jesse Helms, along with Rep. Henry Hyde and a pro-life Democrat, Rep. Romano Mazzoli, introduced in 1981 a Human Life Bill stipulating that human life begins at conception. That bill competed with Sen. Orrin Hatch’s 1981 Human Life Federalism Amendment, which would have allowed each state to determine its own position on the abortion issue.

Some pro-life groups, including National Right to Life and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, supported the amendment. “Nellie regarded that as high treason—the idea of returning the issue to the states was high treason,” said Marshner. “She was personhood or nothing.”

The pro-life community was divided. Neither measure passed.

Sharon Rodi remembers that part of American pro-life history. She remembers other losses too and knows that the 2022 march isn’t the first one to be marked by a sense of anticipation that something will happen at the Supreme Court.

“As a Supreme Court case would come up, we would think, ‘Well, this is gonna change things,’” Rodi said. New Republican Supreme Court appointments would give them hope too, but the movement had one disappointment after another: Justice David Souter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Chief Justice John Roberts.

That experience tempers her excitement about how the Supreme Court will rule this summer in the Dobbs case. “We’ve had so many disappointments in appointees and then in decisions that we think this is going to be it and is this going to be it? I don’t know,” she said. “I wish it would be.”

But even if this is it for Roe, Rodi recognizes that it won’t be the complete victory Gray and other pro-lifers have worked decades for since it will only return the question of abortion’s legality back to the states, the very goal of Senator Hatch’s 1981 bill that Gray opposed.

“We could have had this years ago,” said Rodi. “There are other times in these 49 years when there’s been an opportunity to have a states’ rights amendment and, for many reasons, it went down. Sometimes it went down because people wanted everything: They wanted a human life amendment at the national level; we weren’t going to get that. So therefore we missed getting a states’ rights amendment.” Gray was one of those people, and the anticipated result of this Dobbs decision is not what she wanted.

A LITTLE BEFORE NOON the morning of the March for Life, Katie Brown stood with her father on the grassy lawn of the National Mall in front of the columned Department of Agriculture. The 25-year-old, wearing jeans and bundled up stylishly in a purple coat, scarf, and hat, looked especially petite next to her tall, wide-shouldered father, Hugh Brown. They both work for the American Life League, a pro-life organization founded in 1979 by Hugh’s mother, Judie Brown, that shares Nellie Gray’s ideal of passing a personhood amendment.

Katie and Hugh have both been coming to the March for Life for most of their lives: Hugh since the very first march in 1974, when he came as a 5-year-old. In college, he attended with some buddies from his football team, who together served as volunteer bodyguards for his mom. In the 1990s, Judie sometimes received death threats through mail and fax.

Judie couldn’t be at the march this year, but she explained in an email exchange earlier in the week that she didn’t see the Dobbs case as a solution to the problems caused by Roe. “Dobbs is a flawed law, and so abortion could be regulated but not overturned,” Brown said. “And if it is regulated by the court, permitting some babies to die but not others, that will not be a victory.”

Hugh and Katie share that view. “I think the biggest issue with exceptions is it just kind of—it’s not the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement,” explained Katie, trying to talk over the loud music coming from the rally stage. “Nellie Gray … founded the March for Life to abolish abortion, not just to overturn Roe but to abolish abortion,” she added. When the pro-life movement supports legislation that prevents some babies from being aborted but not others, she said, it’s like “kicking the can down the road.”

“I think a lot of people in the pro-life movement are so eager to claim a victory that they are willing to sacrifice a goal, to maybe shorten the goal post, to claim some kind of victory,” Katie explained. To her, the real victory would be a personhood amendment. Hugh called the idea of overturning Roe “false hope.”

But they still see the benefits of a national march that they think won’t go away, regardless of what the Supreme Court rules in the Dobbs case.

One of the strongest memories Hugh has of his early years at the march—besides the D.C. cold—is being there with his mother, seeing her speak on the stage, and meeting her partners in the pro-life movement: Nellie Gray and Dr. Mildred Jefferson. Going to the march every year, he said, “was just something that the family did.”

Katie said it was the same for her growing up: She’s one of Hugh’s five children, and they would all attend as a family. This year, she and her father rode in on a bus with two of her younger siblings, who came with a group from their Christian high school, where Hugh coaches football.

“To me, the march also has tremendous benefit with the sheer volume of young people that are there because there are speakers there that speak to very real subjects … helping people to be able to understand why a baby’s life matters and why it’s not a disposable item,” said Hugh. He said that even when he was a teenager that countercultural message impacted him.

The march hasn’t always been an event for young people. When Sharon Rodi attended the first march as a 31-year-old in 1974, she felt like one of the younger people there. “It was mostly white … women, and older white women … women in their 50s and 60s,” she said. She was also one of only eight people from Louisiana who came that year. But, as the years went by, the crowd from her state grew larger and got younger. Rodi estimated that, in a good year, more than a thousand schoolchildren from Louisiana alone come to the march. This year, two of her own grandchildren came up with their high schools.

Connie Marshner hasn’t been to the march since the mid-2010s. “It’s a long way, and I get tired,” she said, laughing, in a phone call from her home in Fort Royal, Va., a few days before the March for Life. But she remembers noticing the explosion of children at the march when she started going again in the 1990s after more than a decade-long hiatus.

“Instead of being a grim protest march, which was what it was at the beginning, it was a happy gathering of cheerful praising-the-Lord young people,” said Marshner. “It became the rite of passage for every Christian young person. You went to a March for Life if you were sincere about your beliefs.” She called it a “movement builder.”

During the rally before the 49th annual March for Life, Rodi and her husband, Mark, wove through the crowd of about 150,000 people to find their grandchildren, Claire Nash and Merrick Rotolo. To her, spending time with her grandchildren has been the most memorable part of her long history with the March for Life.

“It’s just so fulfilling for me to have these six grandchildren who want to go to this March for Life, who believe in the sanctity of life, despite everything that’s out there today telling them that … a baby’s life isn’t worth anything,” said Rodi, fighting back happy tears. “And yet as each one of them goes to the March for Life, they come back more convinced of the value of the unborn child.” She said the need to educate people about the value of unborn life will remain long after Roe goes.

For Nash and Rotolo, it’s their first time coming to the March for Life. Rotolo said he got chills when he turned a corner near the National Mall and saw for the first time all of the people who had gathered for the march. He said he wanted to come because of his grandma. “I just kind of wanted to embrace her legacy and continue the legacy that she started,” he said.

As Rotolo walked across the lawn of the National Mall with his school friends toward the start of the march, he said he’s hopeful for the outcome of the Dobbs case. “But there’s still work to be done,” he said, his cheeks rosy with cold.

—with reporting by Esther Eaton

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Sen. Jesse Helms in 1981 pushed for a Human Life Bill, not a constitutional amendment.